Like Taylor Swift, millions of us dream of packing in the day job. But where do we find our Plan B?
Acomment from Zadie Smith caught my attention this week. Asked whether she had ever considered recording an album (she is known among her friends to be a talented singer), the novelist responded: “I have a dream of having a Café Carlyle residency in New York in my 80s. Just me, in a muumuu, singing jazz standards interspersed with literary anecdotes.”
Here she is at the height of her success dreaming of a career Plan B just like the rest of us! When famous people are asked about their possible alternative professions, their answers are sometimes borderline bonkers. Justin Bieber has said he’d like to be an astronaut, Taylor Swift “either an interior designer or a detective” and Barbie star Margot Robbie a trapeze artist (though in fairness she did attend circus school as a child).
Outlandish Plan Bs fascinate me because for years I had one of my own. Despite being perfectly happy in my chosen profession, I had long harboured the fantasy of becoming a photographer. “Do a crash course on YouTube, start a side-hustle,” advised a goal-oriented millennial friend.
I’m afraid I ignored her, because the idea of coming home at the end of a stressful day and starting work all over again on my “5 to 9” sounded like a recipe for, if not full-on burnout, then certainly burnt lasagne for dinner. In the end, I took a lockdown leap and applied to art school to acquire some actual skills. I got a place on a parttime MA in documentary photography at University of the Arts which allowed me to still work.
Has it brought me fame and riches? Not as yet. Like many people who dream of having a go at something different, I was focusing on creative fulfilment rather than future-proofing my finances. By the time I graduated in 2022, my dream of running a portrait photography business was looking a lot less viable – in part thanks to AI headshot generators.
If only I had had a little more Fobo, AKA the fear of becoming obsolete. This workplace trend is an updated version of Fomo – the fear of missing out, which now feels like a poignant throwback to more optimistic times. Gallup has found that 22% of workers are worried that technology will put them out of a job. And who can blame them? Goldman Sachs predicts that generative AI has the potential to automate the equivalent of 300 million full-time positions.
Unless I am following the wrong Instagram accounts, it looks like I am not the only one failing at Fobo. About 40% of UK workers have a side hustle and given the range of work that might be wiped out in 10 years – cupcake bakers, life coaches and web designers to name but three – it seems many of my online friends are in endangered professions.
One estimate suggests that 80% of the jobs we’ll all be doing by 2030 haven’t even been invented yet. So really, we should be dreaming up Plan B careers like those included in a recent Inc magazine article on post-AI professions. The list includes humanmachines teaming manager (basically a sort of HR person to keep the machines in line), AI ethicist (to make sure that the robotics don’t impinge on the wellbeing of those pesky humans) and, most confusing of all, digital detox therapist. Will said therapist be unplugging humans from machines or machines from humans?
There is another reason that nurturing an alternative career might be risky. Research indicates that having a back-up plan can work against you. Having a Plan B as a safety net can cause people to make less effort at their day job and – unhelpfully – run a greater risk of losing it.
So, do I regret pursuing my Plan B? Not at all – hopefully I’ve got a few years before robot photographers take over the world, and I currently spend a day a week on photography. My only sorrow is something unexpected. For so many years, I had the fantasy of trying something new. My “someday” ambition sustained me through dreary and humdrum days. But now I’m actually spending some of my week doing it, this has created a weird empty space in my life. It made me realise that having an alternative career to dream about is in itself sustaining and comforting. You might never do it, and that might not even matter. So, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and start working on my Plan C …
Anita Chaudhuri is a freelance journalist and photographer
mistic that Goldin’s victory marks the beginning of a new acceptance – an unprecedented acknowledgment – that women’s economics is mainstream economics.
I’m hopeful that the potential value of closing the gender pay gap, and other gender gaps, globally, will start to become common knowledge: that economists at central banks and professors at universities will as readily talk about the fact that doing socould add $7tn to the world economy as they talk at present about supply and demand curves.
According to research conducted by the UN, only 61.4% of prime workingage women are in the labour force, compared with 90.6% of prime working-age men. And as it stands, the next generation of women will probably still spend, on average, 2.3 more hours a day on unpaid care and domestic work than men. It’s mostly invisible labour that holds women back from reaching economic autonomy and independence. And this doesn’t just matter to women, it matters to all of us.
In a beautiful bit of irony, just a few hours before Goldin’s prize was announced, she published a working paper titled Why Women Won. In it, she details 155 critical moments in US women’s rights history between 1905 and 2023. Then she herself became the subject of what’s certainly deserving of the 156th spot on that list.
My wish is that in years to come we won’t need to refer to lists such as this, and the gender of a Nobel prize winner will no longer be deemed almost more newsworthy than the merit of the work that actually earned that laureate the prize. This is the beginning of a new chapter, but the work that still lies ahead is considerable.
Josie Cox is a journalist and broadcaster specialising in business, finance and gender equality